


Again

by Emjen_Enla



Series: Prompted Works [39]
Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Cross-Posted on Tumblr, F/M, Keeping Your Partner Awake, Literal Sleeping Together, Lizzie Stark Needs to Sleep, Pre-Season/Series 05, Sharing a Bed, Sleep Deprivation, The Ever-Present Specter of Tommy x Grace, Tommy Shelby needs to sleep, Wait was there supposed to be romance in these rarepair fics?, marriage issues, tired and cranky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:08:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25435162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emjen_Enla/pseuds/Emjen_Enla
Summary: Tommy rolled over. Again. Or Tommy and Lizzie mostly fail at this sharing a bed thing.Written for the 2020 Peaky Blinders Rarepair Bingo answering the prompt: "Sharing a Bed/There Was Only One Bed."
Relationships: Tommy Shelby/Lizzie Stark
Series: Prompted Works [39]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1366669
Comments: 3
Kudos: 30
Collections: Peaky Blinders Rare Pair Bingo 2020





	Again

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoy (even though this is mostly just angst).

Tommy rolled over. Again.

Lizzie almost groaned. He was awake. Again. Which meant so was she.

She and Tommy had been fucking on and off for a decade now and they hadn’t exactly been strangers before that—they’d gone to school together, for fuck’s sake, back before two different set of misfortunes had ended both of their educations. When she’d married him she hadn’t thought there was anything about him that would surprise her. It seemed that she had been a bit too optimistic on that front.

It turned out that she and Tommy were about the two worst people to ever share a bed. They were both sporadically restless sleepers, or, more accurately, Lizzie was a sporadically restless sleeper and Tommy was a perpetually restless sleeper. One would think that would mean they’d bond over shared bedtime misery, but what it actually meant was that sleep was yet another tension in their relationship. On the nights where their restlessness coincided one could wake the other simply by rolling over.

This did nothing to help their already tense relationship, especially since Tommy seemed to be getting more and more restless as the months went by. When they’d first married, he’d come to bed a couple hours after she did, sleep for a few hours before jolting suddenly awake—Lizzie assumed he had nightmares though they’d never discussed it. After that he’d toss and turn for a while, or get up and walk around the house, or simply sit and smoke. Eventually he’d fall back to sleep for another couple hours until morning and that was that.

Lizzie had found that whole routine tiring, but it was preferable to what had been happening recently. Namely that Tommy didn’t seem to be sleeping at all. That was perhaps an exaggeration since he probably would have collapsed by now if he wasn’t sleeping at all—or at least a normal person would have, you never knew with Tommy—so Lizzie figured what was actually happening was that he was only managing short bursts of sleep at a time.

This led to a lot of tossing and turning, which meant that on her restless nights Lizzie was woken half a dozen or more times. It was getting bad enough that she was contemplating just going to sleep in another of Arrow House’s many bedrooms, but that was a line she didn’t want to cross. That was perhaps a bit odd given she was actively seeking a solicitor who would sponsor her for a divorce, so she tried not to think too hard about it. She and Tommy both actively pretended their sleeping situation wasn’t an issue.

“Didn’t you ever wake Grace with all your tossing and turning?” Lizzie had once asked, a few years before, during a string of bad nights—even before things had really started to go downhill Tommy would have weeks where he barely slept. She’d been half asleep when she asked, or she never would have said it. Grace was a peculiar specter over Lizzie’s relationship with Tommy; somehow all-present despite the fact that neither of them ever directly mentioned her.

Tommy had gone so tense when Lizzie had asked that question that she’d thought he was going to get up and storm out of the bedroom. The silence had stretched on and on, unbearably long, before Tommy shifted and cleared his throat, almost awkwardly.

“No,” he’d admitted. “She was a heavy sleeper.”

But that had been years ago and Lizzie was no longer in that charitable a mood. This was the third night like this in a row and each subsequent one was just making her more and more sensitive to Tommy’s restlessness. She was exhausted and just wanted Tommy to fuck off to London again so she could sleep. That was perhaps a horrible thought, but she found that she wasn’t sorry for it.

Tommy rolled over again. Lizzie had had enough. She batted at him blindly with, hitting his shoulder somewhat haphazardly. He froze. “Go to sleep or leave,” Lizzie grumbled. “I can’t sleep with you like this.”

Somehow Tommy went even more still. Lizzie might have felt bad if she wasn’t so fucking tired. She curled deeper into the blankets and tried to ignore Tommy’s tensely still form next to her. It was a bit awkward, but she and Tommy’s relationship was rocky enough that this was far from the first awkward night they’d ever shared.

She had just about managed to doze off again, when Tommy was moving again. She gritted her teeth and growled in frustration, but before she could say something biting, he was getting up, gathering his gun and cigarettes from the bedside table and leaving the room.

Well, at least she’d get some uninterrupted sleep now.


End file.
